Who Owns Your Expertise in the Age of AI? Onix Wants to Give It Back to You

On this episode of The Media Copilot, Pete Pachal sits down with Onix co-founders David Bennahum and Nicholas Nadeau to explore a very different model for AI: one where experts own specialized AI systems built around their knowledge, voice, judgment and point of view.

They discuss why smaller, domain-specific models may sometimes outperform general-purpose AI, how Onix incorporates knowledge that has never appeared online, and why authorship, privacy and data sovereignty could become increasingly important as AI evolves.

The conversation also tackles the business side of expert-owned AI:

Can creators turn their expertise into an AI product? Can journalists do it?

What happens when an AI becomes an authorized extension of a person’s knowledge? And can experts actually participate economically in the value AI creates?

Plus, Pete challenges the Onix founders on hallucinations, model accuracy, scalability and what happens when expert-owned AI moves beyond health and wellness.

Key topics include:

AI and intellectual property

Expert-owned AI

Small language models vs. frontier models

Data privacy and sovereignty

AI hallucinations